The Senate President, Ahmad Lawan, has advised the federal government to provide the needed resources for Nigerian scientists’ resident abroad to come up with a vaccine that would serve not only the country’s population, but of other developing countries.
Lawan gave the advice at the public presentation of a research work on the legislative efforts and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by the Young Parliamentarians Forum in collaboration with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy in Abuja.
He explained that the development was necessary if the government intends to achieve its goal of providing mass immunity for the country’s huge population.
He also implored the government to explore the option of collaborating with international bodies especially seeing the difficulty posed by the refusal of the European Union and countries such as the United States of America and India to sell vaccines to developing countries.
He said that Nigeria must look for ways to collaborate “with citizens who are now either holding dual citizenships in other countries, or are simply our citizens who have gone to other countries for greener pastures for us to have our own vaccines.”
He regretted that in three years, and at the rate of interventions by the government, Nigeria may not be able to vaccinate up to 70 per cent of her citizens with the COVID-19 antidote.
He said:“With our two hundred million and even more, so far, we have only about four million, I don’t know how we can get seventy percent of our people vaccinated, and that will translate to about one hundred and fifty million or even more to vaccinate them in the next two years or even three years.So, we need to work hard, provide the legislative intervention in terms of resources and environment for our scientists to work”.
Also speaking at the event, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, who was represented by the Chairman of the Young Parliamentarian Forum, Hon. Kabir Ibrahim Tukur, said the Covid-19 pandemic created unprecedented challenges to legislative duties across the world.
According to him, the development necessitated emerging requirements in parliamentary procedures which drove innovative techniques to be deployed in a bid to connect the public with legislative actions.
